If you're just back from vacation and feeling a little blurry, here's a reminder of the most important SAN stories this year. We've coupled them with related learning material and tips, to keep you on your toes in the market.

The top 10 SAN news stories of the year are listed below, along with related expert advice. Some of the topics...

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we have been following include the Brocade/McData merger, file virtualization, SAN encryption, iSCSI SANs and storage virtualization.

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BrocData

It's a little harsh, but that's the word on street for the now combined Brocade and McData. Brocade missed its latest earnings targets claiming customers are deferring purchases until the company releases the next generation merged platform early 2008.

Brocade started the trend of networking companies buying into the file virtualization market with the acquisition of NuView in 2006. This year the trend has continued with F5 buying Acopia and Cisco buying Neopath.

Storage managers have been reluctant to purchase storage security products because, until now, these products been very expensive and have added latency to the SAN. Cisco and EMC/RSA are working on a blade for Cisco's MDS directors that will provide SAN-based encryption for tape libraries and VTLs, which promises to alleviate both these issues.

Brocade announced earlier this year that it has partnered with LSI Logic to develop HBAs. Analysts said a third competitor in the HBA market could improve pricing for end users, which is always nice to hear.

Just in case you want another networking standard to worry about, the storage vendors have come up with FC over Ethernet (FCoE). The claim is that the new specification will define the process of adding Fibre Channel information into Ethernet packets as the "payload"; the new protocol would be a Layer 2 networking standard that would allow for the creation of converged networks combining Fibre Channel, enhanced Ethernet, and high-performance computing (HPC) clustered traffic in the data center.

Another cross-protocol standards effort has been led by Emulex, to get FC and SATA devices talking to one another. The company has released a product of its own but so far the rest of the industry has yet to get on board.

Block-level storage virtualization had built a head of steam over the year, but users with say there are either still limits in the products available or limits in their infrastructures that keep the "single pane of glass" management dream just a dream for now.

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